Conventionally, the applicant of this invention has proposed printing apparatuses that print a title of an optical disk such as CD-R (Compact Disk-Recordable) on its surface, and put them on the market in Japan.
This type of printing apparatus includes a tray that supports a disk and a printer mechanism that performs printing to the disk supported by the tray. The tray is moved to an external section of an apparatus main body by an eject operation. The printer mechanism performs thermal transfer printing to an optical disk, which is supported on the tray provided at a predetermined position in the apparatus main body and which is in a stationary state, using an ink ribbon by a thermal head that moves back and forth.
The aforementioned printing apparatus includes a flat box-shape apparatus main body. In the apparatus main body, there is provided the printer mechanism in which the tray, which supports the optical disk horizontally, is placed horizontally, and a carriage equipped with a thermal head is moved back and forth along on the tray.
In the conventional printing apparatus, since the tray is horizontally placed in the apparatus main body to support the optical disk horizontally, the apparatus main body becomes a flat box shape whose bottom area is larger than the height. For this reason, when this apparatus is used as peripheral equipment of the computer system, there is a problem that the space for installment becomes large.
Moreover, in the aforementioned printer mechanism, printing is performed to the surface of the optical disk in one rectangular range, which corresponds to an effective print width that the thermal head has and a distance where the thermal head moves and scans, by one print operation.
Accordingly, in a case where a user desires to provide printing to a plurality of portions of the surface (label surface) of the optical disk by the printer mechanism, the use must carry out the following operations. Namely, the user once pushes the tray out of the printing apparatus by the eject operation after printing one portion. Then, in order that an area, which is opposite to a print area at the first print around a hole of the disk, is made correspond to the position of the printer mechanism, the user rotates the optical disk on the tray at 180° manually to be reset and turns the tray to the apparatus main body. Then, printing is performed to the different portion by a second print operation of the printer mechanism.
In other words, according to this type of printing apparatus, every time when one print processing ends, the tray must be ejected to the external section of the printing apparatus that can attach/detach the optical disk thereto/therefrom. Moreover, such a complicated task is needed that the positioning is performed on the tray to change the placement of optical disk manually and the tray is turned to the apparatus main body to restart the printing operation. For this reason, efficiency of printing work will be reduced.